Why can’t school leaders stop Malvern kids from making fake teacher TikTok accounts?

After students at Great Valley Middle School made 22 TikTok accounts impersonating their teachers — some with crude sexual depictions — school leaders said there was only so much they could do to punish the offenders.

The reason: Much of the social media activity didn’t happen at school.

“It’s a frustrating position to be in,” Great Valley Superintendent Daniel Goffredo told reporters earlier this week. He noted that the accounts, which the district discovered in late February, have “continued to be created throughout the summer months.”

The episode, which garnered national attention, raises questions about the challenges schools face in policing social media use. Here’s what the law says about students’ free speech rights, where the line is murky, and what it means for schools.

There are limits on students’ free speech rights in school, established by various U.S. Supreme Court rulings: Kids aren’t entitled to promote drug use, for instance, or use vulgar language.

“You can’t tell your teacher to f— off in class,” and be protected by the First Amendment, said Witold J. Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. And schools have “a lot of control” over any activities they sponsor, Walczak said.

But what students say outside of school is different. In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a cheerleader who argued she was wrongly suspended from the Mahanoy Area School District in Schuylkill County after posting a profane rant on Snapchat. The student, Brandi Levy, had posted the comment “F — school, f — softball, f — cheer, f — everything” on a Saturday morning, after learning she failed to make the varsity cheerleading team.

She created that post at a local convenience store.

But off-campus speech isn’t always protected. The court found the district hadn’t proven that Levy’s post had substantially disrupted the school environment — a standard for regulating students’ speech, set by a 1969 ruling that said Iowa students had a right to wear black armbands in class to protest the Vietnam War.

The ruling in Levy’s case, however, didn’t define when social media posts would constitute a substantial disruption.

“The court didn’t draw any hard and fast rules,” said Walczak. (The ACLU represented Levy.) The limits of kids’ free speech on social media “are definitely not fleshed out in the law.”

Walczak noted some cases before Levy’s in which courts have also sided with students over social media postings — such as a 2007 federal court ruling finding a Western Pennsylvania school district had violated the First Amendment rights of a student whom it punished for creating a parody MySpace profile of his principal.

In the Central Bucks School District earlier this year, administrators expelled a student who used AI to create an account for a teacher, “saying she was going to kill herself,” said Jim Scanlon, then the district’s interim superintendent. Police showed up at the school; the teacher was “like, what are you talking about,” Scanlon said. “It caused chaos.”

Because the student used a district-owned device to create the account, Scanlon said, Central Bucks had the right to take disciplinary action. “If it’s a district-owned property … you can be pretty aggressive,” he said.

Other events, however, have been blurrier. Central Bucks has been grappling with creating new social media rules for student clubs, after controversy around posts earlier this year by a Muslim student group, including one referring to “usurping Jews.” The club deleted that post, which it characterized as an accident; school board members have been debating to what extent the district should be responsible for social media postings by its numerous clubs.

In an instance, Scanlon said was unrelated to the Muslim club, a student made antisemitic posts that were brought to the district’s attention. The student made the posts at home, and didn’t mention any specific people, Scanlon said.

In that case, “we can’t do much other than talk to the kid and parents and say how wrong it is,” Scanlon said. “That’s really frustrating for administrators.”

While most social media companies have law enforcement liaisons, it can take “a great deal of time and effort” to get the creator of a particular account identified, said Bill Oslick, past president of the Pennsylvania Association of School Resource Officers.

It’s also a struggle to get social media posts taken down. “We tell the individuals to report them to the social media platform,” Oslick said. “It’s one of those things: How quick is the social media [company] going to respond to it?”

Oslick, who works in a school district in Western Pennsylvania, said he has seen students create fake accounts for other students, or anonymous accounts.

“So many times, they have no idea truly what they’re doing,” and are “extremely remorseful or embarrassed” when confronted, he said.

Goffredo, the superintendent, said this week that the district had “held students accountable where applicable.” He declined to confirm whether students had been suspended; the New York Times, citing teachers, reported the district had “briefly” suspended several students.

A district spokesperson also declined to comment on whether the district had concluded the fake accounts hadn’t caused substantial disruption to the school — the standard established by the Supreme Court in 1969.

The spokesperson, Jennifer Blake, said the students who created the accounts hadn’t done so at school, because “we have filters in place in the district that block students’ access to TikTok.” They also can’t access TikTok through district-provided devices, “at home or at school,” Blake said.

At the news conference, Goffredo referred to an “active” police investigation. Chris Yeager, chief of the East Whiteland Township Police Department, said this week that his department “did investigate the complaint, and ultimately consulted with the Chester County DA’s office. We are monitoring the situation at this time.” A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Goffredo said the district — which previously held an assembly for eighth graders on responsible social media use — was working to bolster its digital citizenship curriculum, and engage families in dialogue about kids’ online behavior. He said the TikTok accounts included “grossly inappropriate and hurtful comments.”

“I really wish our students would stop,” he said.